Sunday, May 5, 2013

Some Challenges Using "The New Family Search"

I have used Family Search in the past; but not nearly as Ancestry.  I decided I needed to make sure I had a current Family Tree on their site so thought I would delete the old tree and start over.  Well, I am embarrassed to say I thought I had put a Gedcom on their site some years back; but learned that I was mistaken.  I had entered a pedigree chart of about eight people and that was all.  When I decided to upload a Gedcom to Family Search, I quickly realized that I didn't know as much about their site as I thought I did.  I think their new format further complicated the situation.  Others in the genealogy world have also complained about the difficulty adapting to the "New" Family Search.  Navigating the site can be a bit of a challenge.  For instance, to get to several of the functions you actually click on their green "Family Search" title in the upper left of the home page.  If their tech support people hadn't told me that is how it works, I would still be trying to find how to upload a Gedcom. 

Once I did get the Gedcom downloaded on the site, I then had to  deal with all the merging decisions where some of my ancestors overlapped with other member's family tree entries.  I had about 350 of those decisions to make.  At the rate of about 30 to 40 per hour, that is a huge undertaking!  After spending about 2 hours merging, I decided I would just spend about an hour a day until it is done.  I figure it will take me almost two weeks just to resolve all of the merging decisions!  However, once it is done, I think it will pay off for me in the long run.

My challenge for tomorrow is to figure out how to view my tree now that I have uploaded it to the Family Search site.  When I make the selections that seem obvious to me to view the tree all I can find is the original eight person pedigree chart that I entered several years ago.  Hopefully, I can share with you in the next couple days how to actually view the 1200+ people that I entered with my Gedcom.

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